World News - Suspect arrested in S.C. slaying of 5, including 4 children

Police arrested a man accused of slaying five people, including four children, who were found shot to death in a mobile home, authorities said Sunday.Michael Simmons of North Charleston, South Carolina, was charged with five counts of murder and expected to appear for a bond hearing Sunday, said Spencer Pryor, spokesman for the North Charleston Police Department. Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten, who was performing autopsies on the victims Sunday, confirmed that all but one of the victims were children. The victims' identities were not released pending notification of relatives. Wooten said more information would be released Sunday afternoon. Officers discovered the bodies Saturday after responding to a call. All appeared to have been shot and no motive for the killings had been identified. Monique Singleton, who lives across the street, said four children lived in the home and her children occasionally played with them... http://www.cnn.com

BRITISH troops battling the Taliban are to withdraw from one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan after agreeing a secret deal with the local people. Over the past two months British soldiers have come under sustained attack defending a remote mud-walled government outpost in the town of Musa Qala in southern Afghanistan. Eight have been killed there. It has now been agreed the troops will quietly pull out of Musa Qala in return for the Taliban doing the same. The compound is one of four district government offices in the Helmand province that are being guarded by British troops. Although soldiers on the ground may welcome the agreement, it is likely to raise new questions about troop deployment. Last month Sir Richard Dannatt, the new head of the British Army, warned that soldiers in Afghanistan were fighting at the limit of their capacity and could only “just” cope with the demands....http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2383232,00.html

Some 40 people are feared dead in northern Nigeria after a dam collapsed. About 500 houses were swept away by the waters near Gusau, the capital of Zamfara state. The state governor told the BBC that water behind the dam had reached a critical level following torrential rain, forcing the structure to burst. Staff at the dam had been unable to open the floodgates, Nigerian media reports. State authorities have put up temporary shelters to house survivors. Governor Ahmed Yarima called on the Nigerian federal government to provide aid. He told the BBC that a tidal surge engulfed the area. "The body of water was just like the pictures of tsunami that we have seen," he said. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5396176.stm

A sheriff's deputy showing a handgun to friends at his birthday party accidentally shot himself in the face, killing himself, authorities said Saturday. Matt Barnes 26 told guests at the Fri night celebration his 45-caliber revolver was not loaded, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office. He pulled the trigger around 10:30 pm, authorities said, & was pronounced dead at the scene. Barnes, who had been a deputy for 2 years, was off duty at the time of the accident. The sheriff's office said alcohol was believed to have been involved. Barnes' fiancee witnessed the shooting, authorities said. "It is a tragic, tragic story," Sheriff David Shoar told The St. Augustine Record for Sunday's edition. "He was there with 7 or 8 friends. Sometime during the evening, he picked up the handgun & was showing it around when it accidentally discharged, killing him." Are they going to have a big State Funeral for this? Too bad they can’t give him a paid vacation for shooting himself...http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-01-deputy-killed_x.htm?csp=34

Bush retains "full confidence" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, despite accusations that he botched the Iraq war and a disclosure that a former top Bush aide had recommended his replacement, the White House said on Sunday. White House counselor Dan Bartlett also said Condoleezza Rice, who served as Bush's national security adviser before becoming secretary of state, had urged a complete change of Bush's national security team after his 2004 re-election.This was in addition to efforts by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to replace Rumsfeld, reported in a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Bush's handling of the war. "The president has full confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld," Bartlett told ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Rumsfeld was doing an "enormously difficult job," he added....http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061001/pl_nm/bush_iraq_dc

With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush achieved a signal victory Friday, shoring up with legislation his determined campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts. Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them -- albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment -- beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners. Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy. ...http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/30/MNGNKLFO3P1.DTL